GIGABYTE GA-Z270-Gaming K3 (rev. 1.0) + Plexstor AIC NVME SSD

[jabbermacy]

Hey guys, I have this board + this card: Plextor M8Pe AIC 512GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) PX-512M8PeY.

PROBLEM: I am only getting ~1Gbyte/sec vs. >2.4 in my old rig (ASrock Z170M)
It's ALMOST like it's only using TWO lanes of the PCIe bus vs. 4X.
Card is in PCIEX8.

Any ideas why this could be running so slow?
Also, why would this card NOT show up as NVME device in BIOS?

[shadowsports]

I saw someone with this exact same issue previously.  I think this is the form factor officially supported.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16820249086   (M'2 version) non-AIC

Your board doesn't have any PCIe x8 slots, But the card could probably run up to x4 in one of the x4 slots.  I'd check to be sure it didn't affect graphics performance, or create another resource issue. Is your OS installed to this device?  Were you able to select the UEFI: prefix during OS install?  We've seen this affect disk performance previously.  It may also be necessary to supply an AHCI driver via USB during install for the card to work optimally.

1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)
 * For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot.
2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x4 (PCIEX4_1 and PCIEX4_2)
3 x PCI Express x1 slots
 (All of the PCI Express slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.)

[jabbermacy]

^ Thanks for the quick reply.  Yes, I was able to install Windows with no 'load driver' option (I haven't done this in 10 years, I'll have to check on proper floppy drivers), I don't even know what would be the correct driver to load.  I'll report back any significant progress, else it goes back to Newegg next week...

[jabbermacy]

Well, I guess I'll try the f4 drivers for the board and see what gives...
mb_driver_intel_bootdisk_irst_64_200series

Next:  see if I can rip it out of the AIC...